I am GitHub user 1299, joined February 2008.
Since then, I have opened GitHub every day. Every day, multiple times per day, for over 18 years. More than half my life. There are some exceptions to this (I’d love to see the data), but I can’t imagine more than a week per year.
GitHub is the place that has brought me the most joy. I always made time for it. When I went through a tough breakup? I lost myself in open source on GitHub. At 4 a.m. during college when everyone passes out? Let me make a promise. During my honeymoon while my wife is still sleeping? Yes, GitHub. This is where I have historically been happiest and wanted to be.
Even the annoying things! Some people ruin social media. I’ve been scrolling through GitHub issues since it was a word. Over the holidays I had bookmarks of different projects on GitHub that I wanted to study. Not only the source code, but also OSS processes, how other maintainers react to difficult situations. Etcetera. Believe it or not, I like it.
Some may call it sick, but my hobbies, work, and passion all align and for most of my life they had to live in one place on the internet: GitHub.
Did you know that I started Vagrant (my first successful open source project) largely because I hoped it would get me a job at GitHub? It’s no secret, I’ve said this repeatedly, and in my first public talk about Vagrant, when I was just 20, I joked “If it’s this good, maybe GitHub will hire me!”
GitHub was my dream job. I never got a job there (not their fault). But this was the ideal place I wanted to live. The engineers were incredible, the product was incredible, and it was something I lived and breathed every day. I still do and have been doing so continuously for these 18 years. Enough time for the perfect human to become an adult, on GitHub.
Lately, I’ve been very publicly critical of GitHub. I’ve been bad about it. I am angry about this. I have hurt people’s sentiments. I am shouting loudly. Because GitHub is failing me every day, and it’s personal. This is irrationally personal. I love GitHub more than a person should love something, and I’m angry about it. I’m sorry for the hurt feelings of the people working on this.
I’ve been feeling this way for a long time, but over the past month I’ve kept a journal where I put an “X” next to every date where the GitHub outage has negatively impacted my ability to work.2. There is an X in almost every day. On the day I’m writing this post, I’ve been unable to do any PR reviews for ~2 hours because of the GitHub Actions outage3. This is no longer the place for serious work if it puts you on hold for hours every day, every day.
It’s not a fun place for me anymore. I want to be there but it doesn’t want me to be there. I want to get things done and don’t want to get things done. I want to ship software and don’t want me to ship software.
I want it to be better, but I also want to code. And I can’t code with GitHub anymore. I’m sorry. After 18 years I have to go. I would love to come back one day, but it must be based on real results and improvements, not words and promises.
I’ll be sharing more details about where the Ghosty project will move in the coming months. We have a plan but I am still discussing with several providers (both commercial and FOSS).
It will take time for us to remove all of our dependencies on GitHub and we have a plan to do this as incrementally as possible. We plan to keep a read-only mirror available on GitHub at the current URL.
My personal projects and other work will remain on GitHub for now. Ghosty is where I, our maintainers, and our open source community are most impacted, so that’s the focus of this change. We’ll see where it goes after that.
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